Corporate Welfare and the Invention of Industrial Humanity in the Progressive Era

The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company's Sociological Department represented an industrial welfare plan based on an early understanding of applied sociology. The Department was created as a response to the demands of integrating coal and coke production with steel manufacturing, and the necessity of combating strikes among the immigrant workers. The "settlement house model" used by the Sociological Department was intended to foster labor stability by transforming the lifestyles and habits of the immigrant workers and their families. It is concluded that the industrial welfare programs that were intended to inspire loyalty to the company merely added to the workers' grievances with the company.

Extant research indicates that white racial framing is utilized to rationalize discrimination, but less work has examined how the white racial frame becomes filtered into institutional settings such as corporations and instilled within its programs and practices. This paper analyzes white racial framing in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company during the early twentieth century as part of its effort to Americanize and control its racially diverse workforce. The company developed a special unit headed by a physician and proponent of eugenics to promote “social betterment.” Our findings show how dominant racial ideologies were embedded within the company's conceptualization of social betterment and how these ideas influenced corporate programs aimed at mollifying the workforce and increasing productivity. We discuss the implications of our research for future analyses of historically embedded racial framing.

Reviewed by: Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era by Dominique Brégent-Heald Camilla Fojas Dominique Brégent-Heald, Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. 448pp. Cloth, $60. In Borderland Films Dominique Brégent-Heald explores the idea of “borderlands” to draw together the visual cultures of the borderlands of the United States with Canada and Mexico. Few scholars attend to the role of the US-Canadian border in the cultural dynamics of North America—with such exceptions as Kornel Chang, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and Claire Fox. Moreover, Brégent-Heald contextualizes her study in the Progressive Era, a time when political transformations in the North American hemisphere brought these three nations into intimate contact. The films of this period reflect and subsequently influence the geopolitics of the borderland regions by shaping policy and public opinion about the relationship of the United States to its neighbors. The north and south borderlands are places where ideas about the formation of national, gender, sexual, and racial identities are enacted and take shape. Like other film critics—notably Chon Noriega, Arthur Pettit, and Charles Ramírez Berg—Brégent-Heald argues that early images of the border emanate from narratives that predate the inception of cinema. And she notes thematic continuities regarding the meaning of borders and frontiers while observing the contrast between the Mexican and Canadian borders involving issues and ideas about US national security. This contrast, in which Mexico poses a security threat while Canada is perceived as nonthreatening, emanates from the Progressive Era and the symbolic [End Page 361] representations and storylines of cinematic features, persisting still into current political ideology. Yet both borders are central to ideas about US expansion; moreover, the concept of the frontier as a place to be conquered and colonized abides across the Northwest and Southwest of the United States and in the North in relation to the Klondike, often considered the “last frontier”—though others might argue that US expansion into the Pacific designates another final frontier. Brégent-Heald explores how visual culture and fictions embodying border mythology engaged the Progressive Era’s diverse publics, readerships, and audiences. Indeed, she shows that the border has often been deployed as a convenient shorthand for capturing the ideals of the Progressive Era, standing in for splits between moral values, opposing forces, and other spheres of difference and division, particularly with regard to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Although many of the films in this study are no longer in circulation or even extant, Brégent-Heald turns to their “paper trail,” borrowing Thomas Cripps’s term, to contextualize them, relying on their description in written texts—periodicals, biographies, literature, newspapers, and government documents—to provide a more complete cinematic portrait of the era. In each chapter she compares Mexico and Canada with the United States as a point of reference but not the defining center of her analysis. She teases out differences between the interrelated ideas of the “frontier” and the “borderlands” across various American colonial spaces in early Hollywood, noting how they contribute to the formation of US national identity. She notes parallels between representations of the “Southland,” or the southern US border spaces, and the “Northland,” or land abutting Canada and the Klondike, discerning the various symbolic meanings attached to these borderlands, particularly as imagined spaces of interracial intimacies and contact where normative gender and sexual identities might be redefined and challenged, particularly in relation to the production of racial boundaries. Borders, north and south, become zones where people encounter difference. Overall, Borderland Films is a clearly written and well-argued exploration of the impact of cinema on North American international relations. This sprawling and ambitious archive of hundreds of borderland [End Page 362] films is a much-needed corrective to border studies in the American hemisphere and a model of global and comparative border studies. It will no doubt become a key text of the field. Camilla Fojas University of Virginia Copyright © 2016 Western Literature Association

In Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, anti-union state militia and hired gunmen opened fire on a colony of miners and their families. After a ten-hour assault with machine guns, dynamite, fire, and kerosene, over twenty people died and many more were wounded. most publicized atrocity was the death of two women and eleven children who took refuge in a ground cellar only to suffocate and burn to death in what became known as the infamous Black Hole. Ludlow Massacre became a catalyst for pro-labor movements across the nation as well as a subject of much debate by lawmakers, historians, labor activists, and writers such as Meridel LeSueur, Upton Sinclair, Zeese Papanikolas, and even George S. McGovern. More recently, the site of the Ludlow Massacre has been the focus of annual archaeological digs as scholars endeavor to find more details surrounding the history of this significant labor conflict. Each discovery and rendition of the massacre adds greater understanding to the history of the people, times, and events of the Colorado Coal Strike, but many stories remain to be told. Throughout his lifetime Elias Baca (1895-1998) sang the history of the massacre by synthesizing corrido and union song forms. Taking a corrido form widely used for protest by Mexicans and Mexican Americans and combining it with union song elements, Baca created his own discourse to broadcast and comment on the massacre. Looking at the historical and social contexts surrounding Baca's corrido and at the formulas and customs of both Mexican American balladry and union song allows for several conclusions: First, Hispano and Mexican American culture had a distinct and vocal presence in the Colorado Coal Strike as well as in other mining conflicts throughout the intermountain West. Second, Baca used his corrido to rally Spanish-speaking union miners and to emphasize the unity and power of the union, making Baca's corrido one of the earliest pro-union corridos recorded, if not the earliest. Third, Baca's adaptations and additions to traditional border corrido forms and union songs create a new corrido form as well as a new social identity for its performers. Representing the culture and history of a working-class people who had little access to other forms of expression, Baca's song is a discourse that is critical for understanding the larger history of the massacre, specifically how members of unique ethnic groups worked together to fight capitalist corruption and oppression. HISTORICAL CONTEXT Ludlow Massacre occurred after a long and disillusioning strike. Before the 14 month-long strike, the Colorado state government ruled that mine operators must give miners eight-hour days, an elected check-weighman, the right to patronize any business or doctor, and the right to organize. When none of these rulings were enforced, on September 23, 1913, an estimated thirteen thousand miners went on strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, leaving only 7 percent of the workers in the mines (Powell 1985:101). Tension rose rapidly in southern Colorado mining districts. This strike had a double impact since it also left Colorado Fuel & Iron Company's steel mill without coal, giving the strikers much needed national attention. Even Mother Jones, dear to miners and dreaded by operators around the country, trekked to Colorado and fought for the workers' demands that had been met only with unfair wages, abusive foremen, and horrendous hours and living conditions. Mother Jones was arrested and banned from Colorado four times, but she persisted. Ten days after one of her arrests on January 22, 1914, women and children led a march down the streets of Trinidad to the hospital where Mother Jones was detained. General John Chase feared a riot and went on a rampage after them, instigating what was known as The Mother Jones Riot. Negotiations between the union, operators, and militia were complicated and futile. Even union leaders had disagreements, and the government officials and militia members had lost their integrity. …

TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 433 past, a further tussle to determine what philosophy of land use is most appropriate to balance preservation, reclamation, and exploitation. The author sets all of this, not in dramatic sweeps or sparkling examples, but in a methodical microstudy that is useful if rarely exciting. The early chapters are valuable to historians of New Mexico in particular and of the West in general. But only the last chapters provide a sense of the dramas inherent in these issues, or the stakes. Partly this is a result of Rothman’s attempt to be scrupulously fair, not to take sides in the various disputes but rather to show the ways the players in these contests have brought their own realities, their own pictures of right and wrong, with them to the poker table. Rothman’s sympathies seem to lie with the National Park Service, and the finished work is most attentive to the conflicts between the NPS and various of the contending groups and institutions. Yet On Rims and Ridges ’ subtitle promises the reader much more: some engagement with the central mythos ofLosAlamos and its moment in the sun—the wartime and Cold War secret city where nature was converted to weaponry ofvast and unthinkable destructive force. The war years and the Los Alamos of the Manhattan Project get twelve pages in this book; postwar Los Alamos Laboratory and its people another twelve. Nowhere is there mention of toxic waste, of radioactive leaks, of the ecological disasters that lurk across the history of the weapons establishment. Nowhere is there discussion of the underlying philosophies of nature that characterized the Los Alamos atomic project, both during and after the war—matters that, one would think, might loom large across the landscape of a book whose titular subject is the clash of human conceptions of land and nature. The result is a small book on a large subject, full of enticing anecdotes but without the overarching vision needed to subsume a topic of this magnitude. Peier B. Hales Dr. Hales is director of graduate studies of the History of Architecture and Art Department, and a professor in the College ofArchitecture, Art, and Urban Planning, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His writings on the history of the American West include William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadel­ phia, 1988), and he recently completed a book-length study of the cultural landscapes of the Manhattan Project, tentatively titled “Atomic Spaces.” Mill and Mine: The GF&I in the Twentieth Century. By H. Lee Scamehorn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Pp. x+247; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $37.50. The industrial and technological history of the western United States is a neglected area ofAmerican history. Thus, H. Lee Scamehorn’s Mill and Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century is a welcome examination of one of the West’s largest and most important steelmakers. 434 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The Colorado Fuel & Iron company (CF&I) was the early-20thcentury West’s only fully integrated steel- and ironworks and also that region’s largest distributor ofcoal and coke. The company operated coal mines in four states and manufactured steel and iron in Pueblo, Colorado. During the early years (examined more fully in a companion volume, Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, 1872-1903 [Boulder, Colo., 1976]), the CF&I management hoped to capitalize on the isolation of the western region to compete successfully against larger eastern manufacturers. However, low-cost production techniques and generous shipping rates allowed the eastern plants to infiltrate the CF&I market. By the early 20th century, in poor health and desperate for capital, the company passed into the hands ofjohn D. Rockefeller. The company was managed by his son,John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who took a hands-off approach until the disastrous events of the coal miners’ strike of 1913-14, marked by the infamous Ludlow Massacre. Much has been written about the violence that characterized that strike, but Scamehorn notes that nearly all previous histories take the perspective of labor. Relying heavily on the correspondence ofJesse F. Welborn, president of the CF&I, Scamehorn provides the perspective of management, concluding that “both sides shared the blame for the strike...

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Negro Automobile WorkerLloyd H. BailerLloyd H. Bailer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Volume 51, Number 5Oct., 1943 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/256087 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1943 The University of Chicago PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Nina Banks, Warren C. Whatley A Nation of Laws, and Race Laws, Journal of Economic Literature 60, no.22 (Jun 2022): 427–453.https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20211689Alvaro Calderon, Vasiliki Fouka, Marco Tabellini Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights, The Review of Economic Studies 19 (May 2022).https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdac026Jonathan A. Lanning and C. Lockwood Reynolds The Impact of Ford Motor Company’s Voluntary Equal Wage Policy on Detroit’s Wage Gap in the 1940s, Journal of Labor Economics 40, no.22 (Feb 2022): 505–541.https://doi.org/10.1086/715118Álvaro Calderón, Vasiliki Fouka, Marco Tabellini Legislators' Response to Changes in the Electorate: The Great Migration and Civil Rights, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2019).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3447469Robert P. Weiss Corporate Security at Ford Motor Company: From the Great War to the Cold War, (Jan 2014): 17–38.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137346070_2 Christopher L. Foote , Warren C. Whatley , and Gavin Wright Arbitraging a Discriminatory Labor Market: Black Workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918–1947 Foote et al., Journal of Labor Economics 21, no.33 (Jul 2015): 493–532.https://doi.org/10.1086/374957JOHN BRUEGGEMANN, TERRY BOSWELL Realizing Solidarity, Work and Occupations 25, no.44 (Aug 2016): 436–482.https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888498025004003Wiiliam J. Collins When the Tide Turned: Immigration and the Delay of the Great Black Migration, The Journal of Economic History 57, no.33 (Jul 2012): 607–632.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700113385Warren C. Whatley Getting a Foot in the Door: “Learning,” State Dependence, and the Racial Integration of Firms, The Journal of Economic History 50, no.11 (Mar 2009): 43–66.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700035713James A. Geschwender Marxist-Leninist Organization, Journal of Black Studies 8, no.33 (Jul 2016): 279–298.https://doi.org/10.1177/002193477800800302

Previous articleNext article FreeScientific Value of the Social SettlementsHerman F. HegnerHerman F. Hegner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 3, Number 2Sep., 1897 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/210698 Views: 51Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jennifer Maree Stanley Intersectional and Relational Frameworks:Confronting Anti-Blackness, Settler Colonialism, and Neoliberalism in U.S. Social Work, Journal of Progressive Human Services 31, no.33 (Mar 2020): 210–225.https://doi.org/10.1080/10428232.2019.1703246Robert Snape Becoming Sociological: A Brief Historical Review of Leisure in the Social Survey 1880–1939, International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure 3, no.11 (Jun 2019): 37–51.https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-019-00046-yB. Robert Owens ‘Laboratory Talk’ in U.S. Sociology, 1890-1930: The Performance of Scientific Legitimacy, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50, no.33 (Jun 2014): 302–320.https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.21667Frank J. Weed The Sociological Department at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1901 to 1907: Scientific paternalism and industrial control, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no.33 (Jan 2005): 269–284.https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20104

The aim is to measure and to compare the level of social participation experienced by vitiligo and psoriasis patients in their domestic and social life in an Indian context. A cross-sectional comparative study with a sample of 150 cases each of psoriasis and vitiligo, a total of 300 subjects. A detailed clinical assessment of these two conditions, including the extent of lesions on the affected body parts, socioeconomic status and participation levels in social and domestic lives, was done. The result showed that, 17.3% of vitiligo patients participated minimally in domestic and social life, whereas 28% of psoriasis patients had this problem (P=0.027). Extreme participation restriction was observed only among psoriasis patients (2.7%). Psoriasis patients also faced significantly more restrictions in a number of day-to-day life situations such as, less confidence in learning and applying knowledge, difficulties in meaningfully participating in major life areas like, work, education and employment, and also in community, social and civic life (all three domains P<0.0001), to vitiligo patients. Both psoriasis and vitiligo patients suffered moderate to severe restriction while participating in their domestic and social life. Of these two groups, psoriasis patients faced significantly more restrictions in a number of day-to-day life situations. The Indian population of this study was predominantly dark-skinned and hypo-pigmentation as seen in vitiligo is much more noticeable than psoriatic red patches. However, the results showed that the component of hypo or hyperpigmentation of the skin is not the only factor leading to participation restrictions.

This article forms a critical examination of how the increased digitalization of daily life, exemplified by pandemic digital technologies of tracking apps and digital Covid-19 passports, affects ethical principles of privacy, subjectivity and autonomy, fundamental in a traditional notion of citizenship. The pandemic crisis has been an example of the increasing use of automated technologies across various domains, where society has become deeply reliant on these technologies. I argue that in ethical terms, the pandemic crisis has moved the borders of what is accepted by governments and citizens and have normalised far-reaching tools of registration, calculation, and surveillance. The pandemic state of exception has necessitated and legalised a temporary suspension of normal civil rights and replaced them with spatial ordering, automated surveillance, and the application of advanced and intrusive digital monitoring tools. Based on an empirical account of tracking apps I discuss the consequences for citizenship based on two theoretical figures: Michel Foucault´s concept of “bio-politics” and the concept of “a state of exception” as theorized by German political philosopher Carl Schmidt. Where traditional concepts of citizenships have focused on individual rights, responsibilities and articipation in civic life, bio-politics emphasizes a management and regulation of populations with less focus on individual agency and more on statistical analysis and control mechanisms. Technologies and discourses of automation are inter-related; digital innovation legitimize and strengthen an adherent automation of political logics, framed as a politics of necessity, where calculative predictions and technological facts leave little room for political subjectivity and values. In the concluding section it is discussed whether the rapid automation catalyzed by the pandemic was a state of emergency, necessitated by a pandemic threat, or rather represents a more profound change, a new normal for citizenship.

Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1892-1903

Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1872-1903

Memories of a Massacre Student & Teacher Between Two Extremes Divisions in the Ranks The Rockefeller Plan in Action: The Mines The Rockefeller Plan in Action: The Mill New Union, Same Struggle Depression, Frustration & Real Competition Conclusion Index.

There has been revival of interest in employment representation plans as an alternative way of giving employees a ‘voice’ in a period of declining trade union density. J.D. Rockefeller Jr. played a crucial role in establishing the movement for employee representation plans in the United States before the Second World War, which at one stage may have covered more workers than unions. He established his employee representation plan at the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CFI) in the wake of the Ludlow massacre of 1914 and it served as a model for other employers. This article examines his Plan at the CFI's Pueblo steelworks, which survived for 26 years. It examines to what degree the Plan gave voice to the steelworks employees and to what extent the Plan was a union avoidance strategy. It also highlights union efforts to destroy the Plan in the 1919 Steel Strike and the impact of resistance from supervisors, who resented the undermining of their authority by the Plan.

Trade unionists and labor historians have often denounced company unions for not representing the interests of workers. However, new evidence on the day-to-day workings of the company union at the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, known to history as the Rockefeller Plan, suggests that management made important concessions to their workers because of complaints registered through elected representatives. Nevertheless, despite these concessions, workers were still unsatisfied by a company union, and tended to drift towards independent trade unions whenever the opportunity arose.